Posted on 05/07/2008 9:35:52 AM PDT by bs9021
Bolshevik Begats
by: Malcolm A. Kline, May 07, 2008
If you wonder why your professors cannot let go of their pet theories no matter how badly they work out when practiced in the real world, you will find part of the answer in A Conservative history of the American Left by my predecessor, Daniel J. Flynn.
“From persuasion to politics, politics to revolution, and revolution to a long march through the institutions, the Left’s methods for transforming society have evolved,” Flynn writes. “The ends, though, have remained more or less the same.”
“A brotherhood of man, human perfection, complete equality, needs provided without cost, wants pursued without consequence, heaven on earth—ideas too impractical to live in practice, ideas too beautiful to die as ideas.” Three ideas that old, new and middle-aged Left were all hostile to were private property, religion and marriage, Flynn shows.
Before the Civil War, Leftists with bankrolls tried attraction and promotion in socialistic communities such as New Harmony, Indiana. Shortages, outward migration and depleted bankrolls were the inevitable results of these experiments.
“Marx coined neither ‘socialism’ nor ‘communism,’” Flynn informs us. “He expropriated them just as he urged his followers to expropriate the bougeoisie’s property.”
“In particular, he latched on to ‘communism’ because ‘socialism’ had been so closely associated with Robert Owen.” Owen was the Scottish industrialist who created New Harmony.
“Like so many leftists who came after him, Marx refused to acknowledge his debt to the leftists who came before him,” Flynn observes. “Gods can’t have ancestors.”
Flynn’s last book was Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas. As he shows in his latest, when leading by example didn’t entice America to move in its direction, the Left in America tried another approach—force....
(Excerpt) Read more at campusreportonline.net ...
The UK, Germany, France, and Italy are all moving away from the Left (at least to some extent).
Jonah Goldberg's book "Liberal Fascism: shows what the Left is really like.
Amity Shaeles book "The Forgotten Man" shows what FDR was really like.
This book by Daniel Flynn will help.
And many people on the Left are starting to realize that the Clinton's were low-life trash whose legacy is not a happy one.
Maybe -- just maybe -- the world will wakeup from the 20th century nightmare of Leftism.
We begin by releasing our most hopeful dreams and our most radical imaginations: a better world is both possible and necessary.
Source: http://billayers.wordpress.com/2008/04/page/2/
Note: Ayers is very likely quoting Bob Avakian, chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, with the phrase 'both possible and necessary' in regards to a communist overthrow of the US government. See these Yahoo search results for "bob avakian" + "possible and necessary"--Eye On The Left
bump
As has been stated many times before, I firmly believe liberalism or leftism stems from the basic disbelief in human nature. Leftists are always hatching schemes to try to rouse and reshape human activity. Of course this has always led to the use of force and extreme punishment to achieve “perfection.” The genocides of China, The Soviet Union, and Cambodia are the logical consequences of leftism.
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